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Exactly. Reddit is reading this story as a typical tale of a clique mistreating an outsider, which is why you're getting downvoted. But a clique never turns around and explains why it doesn't like the outsider. Some members will treat the outsider as a friend in private but not in public. Some will talk trash behind the outsider's back. But a mass desertion such as OP has described probably has a cause other than the usual in group-out group social dynamics of high school.

I finally got it. So Sam, who is overweight, obviously, wore the One Ring to stealthily consume Frodo's Lembas bread, which caused him to become just fat enough to the point that he could not, afterwards, extricate his finger from the ring. Smeagol catches on and uses the opportunity to pursue Sam, in hopes of finally claiming the ring, as he runs around Middle Earth trying to work off the added weight. In a list ditch effort, Sam eats at Subway, hence he has gone "to Jared," and slips out of the ring, which Smeagol then finds. What we see in the pic is an expression of his happiness at fate having finally granted him the ring.

Oh, wait, it's a gay joke about a jewelry store and etc. I honestly did not get that at first.

I can't believe you'd bring up "blessing gay civil unions" as an example of tolerance. That isn't tolerance; it's forcing a minority to conform to your church's bigoted, arbitrary doctrine--preserving discrimination against gay people while pretending to be charitable, as though their status as married is somehow the church's decision. How can you possibly want atheists to just let the church be when the church systematically campaigns against gay people AND against atheists? Your system says that atheists go to hell. The Bible, some would argue, holds you accountable for punishing atheists. It is a document founded on intolerance. Atheists, when they are intolerant, at least do not claim to have a supernatural deity justifying their actions. In other words, atheists are open to the IDEA of leaving Catholics alone, but if Catholics want to be tolerant as you do, they have to OPPOSE a centuries-old system of intolerance.

Also, why does it matter that atheists are just as intolerant as Catholics? Atheist intolerance has never led governments to deprive entire groups of basic rights. Christian intolerance has. Atheist intolerance does not mark off an entire group as damned for hell, to be saved only by paying money into a cult of superstition and submitting to bizarre baby-dunking rituals with no basis in logic. Christian intolerance is designed to do just this--to create an out group that the Bible demands MUST be converted! Does atheist intolerance somehow "mandate" that we destroy all other beliefs in favor of our own?

No. And because any intolerance from atheists is a product of an individual decision and not a collective, systematic dogma, it will never be comparable to Christian intolerance. And please don't respond with the obvious "Christians are allowed to make their own decisions too." Of course they are, but once those decisions contradict the system--with the force of God behind it--they are no longer in keeping with church doctrine. This is why your priest would only bless "civil unions." Perhaps his conscience dictates that he might bless gay marriage. But the system will never allow him to do that.

tl; dr: Atheist and Christian intolerance are not comparable in the reductive way the OP has presented them. Even if the comparison were valid, we should not discuss it without acknowledging the evils perpetrated by the church versus the... nothing perpetrated by atheists.

Am I the only one who thought "Challenge Initiated" was supposed to be the reddit signal, like you could say "Challenge Initiated" and if you are a redditor in the vicinity, you say "Challenge Accepted?" It would be a literal interpretation of the "challenges" troops issue in the field to see someone is a friendly or not.

Tell her the truth before she asks. Explain that it's not something that happens all the time. Preemptively make it clear that you know how it looks from her perspective. Then show her this thread and if she doesn't think your reaction to the situation was funny... well I'm all out of ideas then.

Of course, absent any tonal/aural indicators, whose meaning would be culturally relative anyway, the phrase "Can I use the bathroom" is ambiguous and therefore whether one interprets it to mean "May I use the bathroom" is in no way indicative of the length of time he or she has been speaking English, nor would an interpretation that understood "can" as "be able to" rather than a verb modifier speak to one's level of intelligence.

I think my real problem with this comic is the hypocrisy--The person who said "Can you" was obviously trading on an ambiguity in the word, making a sarcastic remark, and your response was to take their remark literally and point out that they should have picked up on your tone. But the basis for your counter-remark was to ignore their tone, and their tone clearly indicated an awareness of the ambiguity of the word "can." You're accusing your friend of the very thing that allowed you to make your accusation.

Charlie Sheen is actually pushing the envelope, forcing the mainstream national consciousness to address Puritanical views on sex and drugs--the real issue Sheen brings up is not whether celebrities need to be role models but the extent to which anyone should be considered obligated to society to not indulge in a similar lifestyle. Sheen's case is one of hedonism versus shame, and he in particular is interesting because of how unabashed (and dare I say intelligent) about it he is--you won't get this from Lindsay Lohan.

The dead soldiers feed into a discourse on war that was done to death before they set foot on a battlefield. In other words, they don't raise any new questions and only reinforce an old belief that war sucks.

I've never had use for twitter before, but I made an account to do just this. It may seem insignificant, but it's important we convey that rational human beings do not consider transparency worthy of criminal investigation. Nor should we be frightened into hiding our political views by the powers that be (I consider support of Wikileaks a political view). An investigation of people who were merely watching a third party air the US government's dirty laundry is nothing short of Orwellian, whether or not they're ostensibly looking for those more intimately involved with Wikileaks.

It's only when society ceases to consider you a second-class citizen that you can begin to think about larger problems.

The economy may affect everyone, but quantity cannot be the sole determining factor in establishing a hierarchy of "problems to be addressed." Marginalization, which affects people primarily on a psychological level, but also economically, cannot be measured in terms of its importance to American politics. A complex structure of racism and cultural values underpins the supposedly simple issue of affirmative action, which white people like to reduce to a matter of meritocracy versus inequality. Voters must address affirmative action because a debate around it may eventually expose the need for other solutions to the disparity between black/latino and white/asian academic success. The problem is important because its resolution has the potential to substantially alter individual persons and personalities in a manner more direct than comparatively amorphous issues like the economy, the military, corporate power, etc.

There's a similar problem with gay marriage. Although economic and other tangible implications of marriage discrimination are difficult to obtain, the fact remains that gay people cannot function as bare, unadulterated individuals in a society that fails to grant them all the rights of individuals. Although we cannot measure the extent to which marriage inequality affects society for good or ill, gay marriage may be a more "important" issue than the economy simply because we as voters have little control over the economy (even if we'd like to believe that voting Democrat or Republican will repair it), but a great deal of control over civil rights. And once again, what's at stake is a substantial alteration of individual persons.

I agree that abortion should not be talked about as much as it is, but only because a scenario where abortion became illegal or prohibitively restricted is unimaginable. Abortion opponents speak out to reinforce their self-images as moral people, not to achieve a real elimination of abortion. This is evidenced by the fact that most opponents cannot even conceive of an apt punishment for women who did have abortions while they were illegal.

Of course, attempting to create a hierarchy of the importance of problems is a really broad task, and at the level we're discussing, probably impossible given the complexity of the issues at hand.

This is a sad commentary on the power of politicians to control the national dialog. And it just goes to show that the Mosque was a contrived election issue only. If only major news outlets would stop biting at this fake controversy garbage around election time.

Style was intelligent enough to predict that argument, but from my observations of the PUA community, this is exactly what people take away from the Game.

Just look at any PUA forum and the bizarre, depersonalized, technical way in which pickups are discussed. Not that pickups can't have a personal AND a technical element, but I wonder if either of these eventually edges out the other.

It would only influence your views on relationships negatively if you began to see your every interaction in terms of an act/strategy. Like anything else, it takes a lot of practice to make the tenets of this book a habit, but even if you did manage to apply the book to your life consistently, I think you would have a more positive view of relationships. The central lesson in How to Win Friends is to think in terms of the other--In other words, to be more selfless, even if that selflessness is just a roundabout way of getting what you want. In this sense I would say the book is more about cultivating a new kind of etiquette rather than transforming your personal relationships into a systematized exchange matrix.

This all compares favorably to books like The Game, where the goal isn't to cultivate a new, friendlier kind of etiquette but to actually see people as objects in a game.